


every gull a seeking craft

by tomurai



Category: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Canonical Childhood Sexual Abuse, Character Study, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Freddy Krueger (Mentioned) - Freeform, Gen, Nancy Holbrook (Mentioned) - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Repressed Memories, post-canon for the movie, probably canon compliant, technically more of a nightmare on elm street fic than a dead by daylight one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22813264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomurai/pseuds/tomurai
Summary: He doesn't need to remember what happened, even though it's there, in the back of his brain.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	every gull a seeking craft

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Kate Bush's And Dream of Sheep. No explicit content, but please be aware of the tags. Small warning for self-doubt in various ways. 
> 
> You know that stage where you know you have trauma, but you don't want to think about it or acknowledge it yet? Yep, that's what this is about.

He finds himself heading back to the preschool, again and again. There's something about it that he needs to know, needs to understand. 

The grass is overgrown, and the chain link fence is torn. It doesn't feel quite real, just like every place in the Entity's realm. Maybe even more here, though — he can see things in the corner of his eye, blurring in and out. The school is so small. Everything feels out of proportion. 

The hooks and generators lie empty and nonthreatening when he's here like this. Scouting, the others call it. He knows that isn't why he's here. It's probably not why the others scout, either. 

Sometimes they just need to be alone. 

He wishes he could have finished high school. He'd never really enjoyed it, or thought about it besides wanting it to be over, but now he feels like he'd give anything to go back to his shitty high school. 

He'd started skipping classes, not paying attention in class, after the whole thing with Freddy. He got called "weird" for staying with Nancy. It was painfully awkward to be around his dad. 

He doesn't know what to think about what he told his dad. Fred Krueger was a monster even before he died, that much is obvious, but whether he deserved to be killed like that... He knows he shouldn't have doubts, not when he did the same thing, not when it was him _wanting to_ that probably brought him to this place. 

He doesn't want to remember whatever Freddy did to him. He has flashes, sometimes. Nothing like what Nancy had — she was remembering even before they killed Freddy. He's an asshole who doesn't want to even believe it happened. 

Why was his first thought that they had lied? He'd read something sort of similar awhile back, about the satanic panic back in the 90s, where kids got told they had forgotten things that had never even happened. 

He's not gonna pretend it didn't happen. But he doesn't want to think about it, and he doesn't have to talk about it — Freddy's left him alone, so far. 

It's selfish of him to not want to remember, maybe. He's not stupid, he knows keeping this bottled up will fuck him over eventually. Nancy told him that, from the webpages she was looking at while he was reading about dreams. 

What he's counting on is for that eventually to never come. Time is frozen here, after all. And he's not going to burden his friends.


End file.
